Prompt: So for some reason Dean is worried/angry/depressed and hits Sam... Again. For like, the tenth time on the show. But instead of sucking it up and keeping calm like he has before, Sam snaps and bursts into tears like a normal person would. After everything he's been through over the last 2 years he just can't handle it. Cue mega guilty and apologetic big bro .

It kinda twisted itself into my own creation, but that was the prompt that inspired it.

Lines

Dean was mad. Sam could see that, but he didn't really have any idea why.

"What the hell is this?" Dean yelled, holding up a sheet of paper.

Sam recognized it immediately and paled drastically.

It couldn't be. But it looked like it.

When he was a teenager, he had kept a list of all the things he did wrong each day.

At the end of the day, he would write lines to remind himself not to do the things again.

For example: Once he had been pulled away from a school the day before he had to deliver a group project.

He had argued about leaving, of course, for all the good it did him. It didn't matter, though; his dad insisted on them leaving.

So Sam was left with the knowledge that he had let his friends (they weren't really his friends because they only really cared about how good he could do their homework for him, but still…) down as much as he had let Dad and Dean down from arguing.

None of them had done any of the work, and therefore wouldn't be able to give a satisfactory presentation on a project that would count for almost half of their grade.

So that night, he had sat down and written over and over and over again that, "I will not partner up with any kids who don't do their homework, because if I have to leave early, they will fail. This will make me as useless at school as I am at home."

It was a rather pathetic thing to do, but Sam had thought it would help him fix what he was doing wrong.

And it might've too.

Except it ended up just being list after list after list of lines on how he was worthless, stupid, unworthy, ungrateful, selfish, weak, and any other negative adjective he could think of to apply to himself.

He had kept these journals (filling book after book after book with the lines) until well after he arrived at Stanford.

Jess had actually been the reason he quit. She said it was unhealthy and wouldn't let him near a sheet of paper that wasn't for school for a very long time.

Sam had eventually gotten rid of all traces of the journals.

But here was Dean, holding up a page that could only be from one of them.

Sam snatched the sheet from him big brother (almost tearing it in the process) and inspected it.

"Where did you get this?" he finally asked shakily.

Dean hauled off and socked him in the face.

What-? Why? What had just happened?

As soon as it registered with Sam, he let out a wail and started crying.

It was a stupid thing to do. Dean was mad, and Sam needed to clam him down.

But it had been a hard two years. And now this.

Sam couldn't. He just couldn't. It was too much.

He started sobbing and dropped down to his butt on the floor.

He felt like a five year old who wanted Daddy because Big Brother was mean and hit him.

There were two problems with this.

One, his dad was dead.

Two, his dad had never actually been his Daddy. The man was his gene donator, not the most prominent guy in his life.

That task had always been shifted to Dean.

He had actually called Dean daddy for quite awhile. He only stopped because he went to Stanford.

So he couldn't have Daddy make it all better, because Daddy was essentially the same person who had just hit him.

He contented himself with curling into a ball and crying.

Supernatural

Dean was stunned. Simply stunned.

When he had found the notebook, it didn't take five minutes to figure out it was Sam's writing displayed on the page.

He hadn't known if it was something they still needed (it had been in the backseat where no one ever sat anymore) so he opened it to see what it was in it.

He hadn't meant it as an invasion of privacy; he just wanted to know if he could throw it away.

The contents were horrifying. Simply befuddling and nausea inducing at the same time.

The whole entire book was filled with page after page after page of Sam's neat handwriting detailing how horrible its owner was.

Dean flipped through it with rising panic and disgust.

What was he supposed to do with this?

What the hell was he supposed to do when confronted with how far back his baby brother's feelings of inadequacy went?

And to think that these from way way back when Sam was Sammy and Dean was Daddy most of the time.

It made it more personal, somehow, that this was from that time. The time when had a baby brother that needed him and looked up to him in every way.

The time when Sammy let Dean take care of him.

Dean had thought he knew everything about that little boy. His little boy.

The sheets of paper in his hands told him differently.

Then he got angry. Angry that Sam's secrets stretched just as far back as his insecurity.

Insecurity that Dean had always tried to keep from him.

He didn't even stop to think before ripping a page out of the book and storming back into the motel room.

He was almost seeing red.

He should've waited until he was calmer. He really should've.

But he wasn't thinking straight through his hurt and horror.

So when Sam asked where he had gotten the page, he also didn't hesitate to punch his little brother in the face.

He felt guilty as soon as he had done it.

Sam didn't deserve that. It had been years ago, and, yeah, Dean felt perfectly justified being angry about secret keeping, but he shouldn't have punched his brother.

He was more than prepared to apologize, except he wasn't given the chance.

Sam wailed and fell back on his butt before bursting into tears.

And now he was pretty sure he was in some form of shock, and he had made Sammy cry.

It was Sammy, too, not Sam.

Dean could tell the difference.

"Hey, hey, hey," he soothed, dropping to his knees and wrapping Sam in a hug. "It's gonna be alright. I'm sorry."

Sam continued to cry, but uncurled himself and latched onto Dean instead.

"'M sooooooooory!" he wailed.

"No, it's my fault," Dean refused. "I didn't like what I saw on that sheet. You wanna tell me what that's all about?"

It was uncomfortable to be sitting on the floor with his huge little brother practically in his lap, but he had to know this. Had to know what prompted Sam to write over and over and over how he wasn't worth the air he took to breath.

"Was a long time ago," Sam tearfully explained.

"That's ok, I still want to know," Dean told him.

"It wasn't supposed to turn out that way. It was supposed to be a list of things I did wrong so I would remember not to do them again," Sam vowed as though it was of great importance for Dean to understand this.

Dean passed one hand through Sam's hair while the other massaged up and down his baby brother's spine.

"I don't know what happened. I just wanted to remember. The next thing I knew, I was filling books with lines telling me how worthless I was," Sammy continued distantly.

"I wasn't gonna stop. I didn't plan to. But Jess found out about it and said it wasn't healthy. She wouldn't let me have paper unless it was for school," he smiled a little faintly.

"I think it was too late, though. I wrote in them for so long, De," he sighed as he finished.

"How long?" Dean questioned much more gently.

"I don't know," Sam answered. "I think I started at about fourteen, but I know I stopped when I was nineteen."

Dean felt like he had been the one punched.

Five years. His brother had written every degrading and self hating think he could think of for five years.

"Well then," he declared, thinking aloud. "I guess we'll just have to spend five year fixing it too."

Normally, this would've irritated Dean. He was far to busy planning things out to worry about it, though.

"Up," he urged, carefully tugging Sammy back to standing.

He ushered Sam over to a bed, then collected a pen and a new notebook.

Sitting down next to his baby brother, he shoved both items into Sammy's hands.

"What-?" Sam trailed off.

"You are going to do exactly the opposite of what you were doing before," Dean ordered.

Sam tilted his head to the side, looking confused.

God he was adorable. It wasn't fair that he looked like a five year old like that. It just wasn't.

"You're going to write lines about how good you are instead of how bad you are," Dean clarified. "For example, you're going to write 'I am not worthless' three hundred time before we go to bed tonight."

His little brother went bright red.

"I can't do that, De. Do you have any idea how conceited that sounds?" he objected.

"Sam, if you know what's good for you, you're going to start writing now," Dean threatened.

When Sammy still looked reluctant, Dean figured he should add something to that.

"I can think of several things I would've had you do if I found out about this when you started it. You probably would've found you skinny little butt planted in a corner until I clamed down enough to deal with you, for one thing. I'm also thinking you wouldn't have been sitting quite as comfortably as you are now. If you wanna go in that direction, I wouldn't mind," he stated.

He actually would mind, but Sam had never called him on that kind of bluff before.

"Fine," Sam muttered, actually pouting as he lowered the pen to the page.

Sam pouting should be illegal. It really should.

Dean still felt guilty as hell. Not only had he missed this before, but he had also punched his baby brother.

But it would be alright.

He would make this better.

He had to.

I think this is my longest one shot yet.

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